Earlier this year the four major credit card brands, Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover all made announcements that they would no longer require customers to sign for credit card transactions. The dollar amount didn’t matter anymore. You may remember that grocery stores stopped asking you sign for small purchases quite some time ago. Yet, everywhere you use your card, from an airport parking lot to restaurants, we are still asked to sign the credit card slip. You may wonder why. Here is some information about signatures.

#1 – You Don’t Need a Signature

The message was poorly delivered to merchants and they simply lack the knowledge. We would like to think that Chosen Payments merchants all know because we delivered the message to our clients in many different formats. However, many people don’t take the time to read our newsletters (which are chock full of information) or they simply are stuck in their ways.

In case you missed it, let us tell you about it again. Attention merchants, you no longer need to ask customers to sign for purchases. Yes, even if the transaction is $1,234.56. Our largest merchant transaction last week was $85,000 in a single transaction. No signature was required. This should speed up the checkout process.

One of oldest forms of payments to a business is the paper check. For years merchants have accepted paper based checks and hand carried them to the bank for depositing into their bank account. Fingers crossed that the check doesn’t bounce. The use of Automated Clearing House payments or ACH for short has improved cash flow by drastically shortening the time it takes the money to actually be in your bank account.

Benefits of Using ACH

For starters, using ACH gives you an edge of convenience for you customers. The payment is quickly processed without the need for an actual paper check. Merchants receive funds faster and easier than waiting for a paper check to process through the slow moving process between banks.

How Does ACH Work?

Accepting credit cards by phone is risky business to begin with. Almost all fraud involves taking a credit card by phone. Unfortunately, accepting credit cards over the phone is a common practice so we must recognize the risks associated from your point as a vendor as well as the risk to your customer.

Safety First

Fraud isn’t the only risk from a phone order. Never accept a credit card from someone when you know they are driving a vehicle. Ask them to call you back when they are no longer driving. The sound of metal crunching is an awful sound that more than one merchant has reported hearing while accepting a credit card by phone.

Most businesses that sell directly to the consumer use Level I credit card processing for handing transactions with Visa, MasterCard and American Express. However, if you specialize in doing business with other businesses and your primary business model is conducting business with small to medium sized businesses, you might be using Level II processing or perhaps should be using Level II. This is ideal for ground transportation companies who do business between each other. We'll save that for another article and go right to Level III processing.

Level III payment processing is used for transacting business with larger corporate or government purchasers. Using Level III will help optimize interchange rates and save you money as a merchant. With Level III processing, there are many more fields of information to complete on each transaction that help the accounting department of the purchaser reconcile purchases. There may be anywhere from 15 to 100 fields of information to complete based upon the cardholder entity.